One sympathizes with Americans weary of global responsibilities that they, unlike the European empires, never sought. You can understand why the entire left and much of the right would rather vote for a quiet life. The Jewish state felt the same way in the early Nineties. There’s an Israeli coinage that was popular back then: “normaliut”—the desire to wake up each morning and live a normal political life, as John Podhoretz described it.9 In the early Nineties, Israelis wanted normaliut, badly. They regarded themselves as a western democracy and wished to live like one. Instead of having to be on the military call-up list till you’re European retirement age (fifty-five), they wanted to be like other westerners and worry about their vacation destinations and the quality of their stereo systems. The Oslo Accords were a vote for normaliut—a vote to be like Oslo, for the chance to live as a Middle Eastern Norway. In return, they got an Arafatist squat and then exterminationist Iranian proxies on their borders, and suicide bombers on their buses, and in the wider world isolation, demonization, and delegitimization, accompanied by a resurgent and ever more respectable anti-Semitism.
In 2008, the U.S. electorate voted to repudiate the previous eight years and seemed genuinely under the delusion that wars end when one side decides it’s all a bit of a bore and they’d rather the government spend the next eight years doing to health care and the economy what they were previously doing to jihadist camps in Waziristan. In the old days, declining powers seeking to arrest either their own decline or another’s rise would turn to war—see the Franco–Prussian, the Austro–Prussian, the Napole-onic, and many others. But those were the days when traditional great-power rivalry was resolved on the battlefield. Today we have post-modern post-great-power rivalry, in which America envies the way the beneficiaries of its post-war largesse have been able to opt out of the great game entirely.
In reality-TV terms, the Great Satan would like to vote itself off the battlefield. It too yearns for normaliut.
So instead of unilateral Bush cowboyism, we elected President Outreach, a man happy to apologize for the entirety of American policy pre-January 2009.
How’s that working out?
In 2010, Zogby International and the University of Maryland conducted an “Arab Public Opinion Poll” for the Brookings Institution.10 They interviewed respondents in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—the so-called “moderate” Arab Street. So how did President Obama do with the citizens of our allies after all the Islamoschmoozing and other outreach to the Muslim world?
In 2008, the last year of the Bush Texas-cowboy terror, 83 percent of Arabs had a very or somewhat negative view of the United States.11 By 2010, the second year of the Obama apology tour, 85 percent had a very or somewhat negative view. So much for the outreach.
So if they don’t like Obama, who do they like? The poll asked which world leader (other than their own) do you most admire? Here’s the Top Twelve: 1) Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey (20 percent); 2) Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela (13 percent); 3) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran (12 percent); 4) Hassan Nasrallah, head honcho of Hizb’Allah (9 percent); 5) Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria (7 percent); 6) Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France (6 percent); 7) Osama bin Laden, Abbottabad’s leading pornography aficionado (6 percent); 8) Jacques Chirac, the retired Gallic charmer (4 percent); 9) Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi (4 percent); 10) Hosni Mubarak, president of Egypt (4 percent); 11) Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid, Emir of Dubai (3 percent); 12) Saddam Hussein, Iraq War loser (2 percent).
What a hit parade! Twenty percent voted for the avowedly Islamist leader of a formerly secular pluralist Turkey; 57 percent voted for current dictators, dead dictators, thugs, terrorists, and a couple of wealthy minor princelings of the Muslim world; and the remainder celebrated diversity with Hugo Chavez and a pair of French roués. Maybe if Obama abased himself even more ostentatiously, maybe if next time he bows to the King of Saudi Arabia he licks the guy’s feet, maybe then he can boost his numbers up to Jacques Chirac level.
But, just as fascinating was the so-called “realist” reaction of the pollsters’ clients, the Brookings Institution. They took all the above as a sign that America needs to work harder to distance itself from negative perceptions that it’s too closely allied with Israel.
